June 2018

The has been updated. This is a regular quarterly update to 1,600 indicators and includes both new indicators and updates to existing indicators.

Data for population and national accounts, including GDP and GNI-related indicators, have been released for countries and aggregates.

The methodology for presenting value added for the services sector has been revised, and financial intermediary services indirectly measured (FISIM) are presented separately. Historically, FISIM was used in the calculation of the “Services, etc” indicator. Starting with July 2018 update of the WDI, FISIM is presented as a separate series, where available. In addition, the “Final consumption expenditure, etc” and “Household consumption expenditure, etc” data included any existing statistical discrepancy between GDP according to production methodology and GDP according to expenditure methodology. Starting with this update, these two series will no longer be published. Instead, indicators for final consumption expenditure and household consumption expenditure are now available. Users can find the statistical discrepancy listed as a separate indicator. You can access the latest list of indicator additions, deletions, descriptions and code changes . The methodology for calculating value added shares has also been .

Other data that have been updated include FDI, tariffs, monetary and prices indicators, balance of payments, trade, health, military expenditure, air traffic, CPIA ratings, and fisheries. Purchasing Power Parities (PPP) have been updated for OECD and Eurostat countries to show the latest release. The country classification hierarchies and group aggregate data reflect the new fiscal year 2019 income classifications. Historical data have been revised as necessary.

Data can be accessed via various means including:

- The World Bank’s main multi-lingual and mobile-friendly data website,
- The DataBank query tool:which includes .
- and directly from the API

In 2017-18 we visited the Meta department in Colombia on multiple occasions. Located right where Colombia’s Llanos Orientales (Eastern Plains) disappear south into the vastness of the Amazon rainforest, this area of the size of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg combined is a magical spot in the world’s second most biodiverse country.

Meta is not a poor region - it boasts some of the nation’s largest oil reserves. Highly fertile soil and multiple thermal floors have created a boom in agribusiness in recent years, while its geographic proximity to Colombia’s capital has more recently led to a thriving tourism industry.

Despite having made significant progress on many fronts, this region still faces critical challenges. On our last visit, we had the opportunity to chat for hours with several small-scale farmers from south-western Meta – a sub-region where economic development has been seriously damaged by the cultivation of coca leaf, the raw material used to produce cocaine.

Making the case for increasing the national budget allocation to the health sector is critical if more domestic resources are to be garnered for financing universal health coverage. Yet, there are competing priorities for more allocation for other sectors. While political will remains pivotal to decisions on national priorities, against limited resources, fiscal managers- such as ministries of finance or treasury- have a challenging job translating national priorities into budget allocations for sectors.

Dan Kopf at Quartz has a nice summary piece on “” – covering work in Malawi (by Berk and co-authors), in South Africa, in Bangladesh, and a forthcoming WBRO paper on cash transfers and intimate partner violence that overviews 14 studies “eleven of these studies found a reduction in domestic violence, two found no change, and only one found an increase”.

on the From Poverty to Power blog.

In a new Finance & PSD impact note, Miriam Bruhn, Rekha Reddy and Claudia Ruiz summarize work they have done in Mexico that uses matched diff-in-diff to - “technical assistance allowed rural credit unions to increase their operating efficiency and reduce their non-performing loans ratio. Part of these gains translated into higher returns for the credit unions, but they were also passed on to the final borrowers in the form of more credit at lower lending interest rates.” We are now up to .

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When we think about what transport will look like in the future, one of the key things we know is that it will be filled and underpinned by data.

We constantly hear about the unlimited opportunities coming from the use of data. However, a looming question is yet to be answered: How do we sustainably go from data to planning? The goal of governments should not be to amass the largest amount of data, but rather “.” Those insights will help drive better planning and policy making.

Last year, as part of the Word Bank’s longstanding engagement on urban transport in Argentina, we started working with the Ministry of Transport’s Planning Department to tap the potential of data analytics for transport planning. The goal was to create a set of tools that could be deployed to collect and use data for improved transport planning.

In that context, we lead the development of a tool that derives origin-destination matrices from public transport smartcards, giving us new insight into the mobility patterns of Buenos Aires residents. The project also supported the creation of a smartphone application that collects high-resolution mobility data and can be used for citizen engagement through dynamic mobility surveys. This has helped to update the transport model in Buenos Aires city metropolitan area (AMBA).

“June; too soon. July; standby. August; come it must. September; remember. October; all over”. This Caribbean nursery rhyme warns of the impending hurricane season and lets families know that it is time to start preparing for potential disasters.

When I arrived in Tunis almost a year ago, one of my colleagues at the World Bank office tried to explain to me how the rules in effect had made it impossible to export high-quality olive oil. I found it difficult to understand what she was saying, as it seemed to me that the export of high value-added products should be a major goal for the country. However, to date, the problem persists ...

Nonetheless, foreign flows towards the country through Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) and concessions have sharply declined, from US$59.2 billion in 2012 to US$7.3 billion in 2017, according to World Bank latest .